Posted on 9/7/2006, 5:13:49 PM by Chi-townChief
When I was a little kid, my family took a vacation to Panama Beach, Fla. After sitting in our un-air-conditioned car for more than two days, reading comic books, counting license plates, fighting with my sister over territorial interstices of the backseat, I was a crazed 6-year-old by the time we hit the Gulf of Mexico.
We pulled into the motel. I put on my bathing trunks, sprinted across the white sand into the warm water and instantly was stung by a Portuguese Man-of-War.
The tentacles wrapped around my leg, and when my dad and a lifeguard pulled me out the water, the stinging ooze got them, too.
All of us were flushed down with fresh water to get the jellied poison off our skin.
I had a fever for a couple days and stayed in bed with a blistering rash that had to be treated with ammonia.
Believe it, I never went back in the Gulf.
I thought about that long-ago incident when I heard that animal provocateur Steve Irwin, the Australian television celebrity known as ''Crocodile Hunter,'' was killed Monday by a stingray's barb while filming a show off Australia's Great Barrier Reef.
There's nasty stuff in nature.
And Irwin, a hyperactive entertainer whose giddily-excited expression was part-lemur, part-carnival barker, was drawn to it the way a cat is drawn to rolled string.
I am saddened that he died, and it is tragic that he leaves behind a wife and two small children and many friends and fans.
But isn't there something very much like karma at work here?
If you flaunt the dangers of the animal kingdom -- using the creatures' teeth, claws, armor, venom, reflexes as your props -- you really aren't teaching about the natural world, you're exploiting it.
Besides putting himself recklessly in the path of creatures' natural instincts, hyperventilating, ''Crikey!'' every so often, and mesmerizing awe-stricken kids crouched in front of TV sets -- what exactly did Irwin, lauded as a conservationist, do?
His show, ''The Crocodile Hunter'' which is now in reruns, at one point aired in 130 countries.
No doubt all the snakes and alligators Irwin chased and handled and dodged made some people aware that a natural world exists outside our sanitized cities, but I'm not sure his actions made many people make the leap from voyeurism to animal conservation.
Strictly show business
The simple fact is, Irwin's show was an inevitable melding of ''Jackass'' meets ''Wild Kingdom'' for the short-attention-span set.
When he held his infant son Bob in one hand while feeding an unrestrained giant crocodile in 2004, it wasn't hard to realize that entertaining and risk-taking were more important to Irwin than saving nail-darters or butterflies.
I grew up in a wooded area Downstate, and the Midwestern natural world was a big part of my growth.
I marveled at tadpoles turning into frogs, blue eggs turning into robins.
Circuses always gave me the creeps, with the circus animals seeming like slaves as terrifying in their subserviance as the clowns were in their insane theatrics.
I never liked zoos, either.
The animals held there, pacing back and forth in deranged rhythms, scratching incessantly, eating junk tossed from the crowd, sleeping like drugged inmates, are not dignified sharers of this earth, but prisoners.
When I saw Siegfried and Roy perform in Tokyo 15 years ago, I was creeped out as they used 600-pound tigers and other rare beasts to make their ''magic'' dangerous, smiling like sun-tanned Vegas acts all the while.
Again, it was tragic when Roy was mauled by one of the act's giant cats a couple years ago, but if the danger never were manifested as actual danger, what was the point of humiliating the proud beasts as if they were trained workers in on the show.
There was the grizzly bear guy who filmed himself with the bears in Alaska, and then was mauled and killed by the beasts he treated like his card buddies.
No, that is not what nature is about. Nature is value-free, what it must be.
Sorry, it's not our kingdom
Wild animals are not good or bad or here for our amusement.
They are here because of the natural plan that is far more complex than TV shows, and what they do is based on what they need to do for survival.
Stingray attacks are rare, and fatalities are rarer.
But as one expert said, the stringray that struck a barb into Irwin's heart no doubt did so because it felt it was provoked.
And wasn't that what Irwin did?
When I was a kid I had ants and beetles as pets. I had crickets and caterpillars, garter snakes, stag beetles, guinea pigs, white mice, Luna moths, gerbils, frogs, toads, tadpoles, snapping turtles, painted turtles, box turtles, guppies, salamanders, even, at one point, a wounded field mouse.
I knew a skunk was a weasel, a beaver a rodent, and a walleyed pike was actually a perch.
The natural world always amazed me.
And it scared me, too.
Pity Steve Irwin didn't run into a jelly fish and not the end.
mailto:rtelander@suntimes.com
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Drop jawed Speechless.................
Um, Rick Telander, Germaine Greer is flattered that you think she's hot, but she is still too repulsed by men to go out with you.
Flaming liberal full of "I, me, my." Go contemplate your navel, butthead.
Didn't she write the same article when that enviro-wacko was eaten by the bears?
The difference between you and Steve Irwin: Nobody gives a crap about what happened in your life.
Tool.
Rick Telander sounds like a real di*kweed. Do Chicago Sun-Times readers know, I wonder, that he knows so very much about the animal world? What a guy.
While he may have a valid point about Irwin's exploitation of wildlife, I think it is a bit harsh to be this critical of it.
So he exploited animals for our entertainment... big deal. He died doing what he loves, and that's more than most of us will be able to claim.
Wow his perspective is so right on and Irwins was so out of line. There is so much for these liberals to teach us if we would only listen...../s
If that's true, you should have died as a kid when you got stung--weren't you exploiting the natural world when you jumped in the ocean?
Sounds like Telander takes the low road, appropriate for low life I guess.
Without knowing this guy, I can tell he is a flaming liberal.
Only a liberal would so easily spew forth such condescension. I am sure he was the one watching the PBS special on the life cycle and sex life of the Spotted Reticulated Dung Ant, drinking his glass of wine.
The mind boggles.
I'm getting SO sick of these a**clowns who think they know so much more about wildlife than Irwin. Irwin was a showman, of course. He wanted his show to be entertaining. But beneath the showmanship was a trained professional with years of experience dealing with dangerous animals. What happened to him was a freak accident, and could have just as easily happened to Jacques Cousteau or Marlon Perkins in their day.
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